Gentoo 2005.0: A Live CD And [No] Graphical Installer

Sunsetbeach writes "zdnet.co.uk reports in this article that 'The next version of Gentoo, 2005.0, will also include a graphical installer that will allow users to automatically install the same set-up of Gentoo on multiple machines, according to Gianelloni.' " The article distinguishes the upcoming live disk from the (available) Gentoo Live CD; the new one will contain a fully functioning system ala Knoppix. Update: 11/30 23:09 GMT by M : Gentoo now has a clarification posted; the next Gentoo release will not have a graphical installer, although it is planned for the future.

Comments

This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

It really is a fantastic distro and this will allow it to be used by many many more people.

I pretty much started my Linux experience with Gentoo, which was difficult to say the least. This way though it can be setup easily by the inexperienced, while everyone else is still free to do a Stage 1/2 install

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[maekke]

I am not really sure if this is *really* good to have many more people... I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro, you have to spend time to understand it and able to use it. So I hope, that they will find a way that everybody will be happy :-)

greetz

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Jugalator]

I like Gentoo for its customisability. All the other distros are hell bent on throwing in everything which is great, but uses up so much RAM. I've seen SuSE use a full gig before just running KDE. With Gentoo I can leave all the little things I don't want out.

No.

Distros to fill in this gap has become more and more common lately. See also Knoppix, Mepis, and Ubuntu. It's almost like a new generation of Linux distros taking form, and I personally like those better than the Lindows abomination. :-S I like distros to have a goal to be only on one CD. Usually stability and user friendless come more easily from that as well, since there's less that can go wrong and less options to confuse the user.

I'm now using Mepis as a Linux amateur and it's great! :-) I can choose to run it off CD and get an excellent rescue disk that way with on-the-fly NTFS and SATA support, and also automatic network configuration. And if I like it enough, like I did, I can just install it on disk and it still has everything I can ask for from a basic OS as a normal user. It felt funny to install the OS from within the OS. :-)

And if I need more, it's an excellent Debian-based distro I can use simple apt-get commands or even simpler installer GUIs if I like it that way. Has been rock solid so far, as opposed to Mandrake 10 after around 5 days of regular use. :-P

Suddenly, multi-CD (or even multi-DVD *gasp*) distros feel so... yesterday.

Oh, oh, I can see it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Dozens of post making oh so funny remarks that they are still not done compiling the old version before the new one comes out.

At least as many posts telling us that gentoo is the best and only distribution real man can use and that their boxen run so much faster now.

Half a dozen links to funroll-loops posted.

Anyway, I think this is great news. Imho gentoo really is a great distribution for what it does but there have been a few things missing that now seem to fall into place.

Kickstart like functionallity was one and a really stable (not in that it does work, but as in install and then have a stable system that will not be updated but only receives bug fixes) is also on the way.

And portage will finally get reverse-dependency checking when uninstalling, at least some gentoo devs are working on it.

Go gentoo!

this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is just like BSD, but a million times better:

1. With Gentoo you can choose what version of software to install (tested or not very)

2. USB actually works

3. Ext3 is much better tested than UFS2 (and all Ext2 tools work with it too)

4. Portage works much more reliably than BSD ports system (because Portage installs in /var first and then moves stuff to /usr, wheres BSD ports aren't smart enough to do this)

The only thing that was keeping Gentoo behind BSD was the rather tedious installation (you have to follow some steps from the How-to). Now, with this automated, there will be absolutely no reason for anyone to use BSD

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[carnivore302]

I still have no idea why this would totally crush BSD. Gentoo is a linux flavour, so unless gentoo adds something not standard to linux, nothing has been gained. If Linux didn't already crush BSD before, I don't think it will do so because of gentoo. It is the quality of linux that moves people away from [insert your OS here], not the distro (which in the end are all the same plus some extras that set them apart from eachother)although I must admit gentoo is a very nice distro. I use it myself and am very happy with it, but wouldn't want to give it to linux newbies.

Re:Star Wars Characters

[Zork the Almighty]

Gentoo is the name of a very fast type of penguin. George Lucas has no claim (he's too busy making turkeys).

Gentoo Install Flexibility

[Brian Blessed]

It's very common for people on /. (who are, perhaps familiar with other distros) to denounce Gentoo for its lack of a graphical installer, but I've always seen this as a good thing. The person installing Gentoo has clear and precise instructions outlining what actions need to be performed, so they can very easily adapt those to a wide range of different situations. E.g. I don't like to have to burn CDs unnecessarily, so I make my kernel first and then network boot into the stage1 filesystem.

I believe that, in general, it's a better design decision not to have an overly intrusive installer for any software because that can tie too much of the software's configuration to the installation process, rather than having a comprehensive way to configure the software post-install.

- Brian

Some advantages of an installer

[tmk]

I want to outline some advantages of an installer:

• You can configure the system first and the installer does the rest. No need to wait for the completion of step 1, step 2, step 3. You give just all information needed and the installer makes the rest. You can work something else until the installer is finished.
• The learning effect is low when you have to type a long line of parameters from the manual. This does not mean, you have understood anything. With an installer you can give the lectures right on the right place. 'Learning by doing' instead of 'learning by typing'.
• There is no real need to make the central configuration files by yourself. The normal user has only one set of devices, he will not change the /etc/fstab every week or once a year. Other distributions show that you don't need to know exactly the syntax of an file to know how the system works.

Am I missing the point?

[GuyFawkes]

This lappie I'm typing on is running Mepis flavoured debian, I did briefly play with gentoo about a year ago...

As I understood it, the sole advantage of gentoo over the likes of debian (on the assumption that functionally apt-get = emerge etc) was that instead of installing precompiled packages in debain, the gentoo user compiles and optimises everything for their specific hardware, thus gaining anything from a miniscule amount to perhaps a few percentage points in performance boost versus the debian approach.

In the final analysis for me such minimal gains simply were not worth the CPU time and disk thrashing so I walked away from it.

So a GUI led gentoo live-cd installer is either going to be losing all that one area of bespoke compiling advantages, OR, you're going to be running that live cd in ramdisk and compiling the install in what's left until kernel 3x is out?

Is this correct?

Re:offtopic rant

[antiMStroll]

I always thought a way to handle this is:

issue two IDs to all users, one their publicly visible 'normal' ID and a hidden second 'moderator' ID

identify all acts of moderation with the hidden ID

allow all users to see a moderation ID's history

provide an avenue to report abuse, or alternately auto-disable mod points for a period if they consistently exceed a set up/down ratio

Moderation still occurs anonymously, but now with a trackable history. This identifies moderators who target individuals, people using multiple accounts to self-moderate, or those who tag on-topic first posts redundant.

Gentoo mini-review from non-fanboy

[bender647]

I recently did a Gentoo install for the heck of it -- I happily run other distributions and other OSs too, but wanted to make an educated comparision.

What I liked:

• portage = best feature of FreeBSD added to Linux.
• excellent install documentation = again, stealing a page from FreeBSD's handbook.
• hands-on install: some people say this will make you know something about linux. Perhaps not, but you can go back and re-read the handbook later and figure out what you did. After a graphical installer is done, you've got no record of what happened and no chance to learn. Best feature of the command-line install to me is that you have a chance in hell of recovering from an unexpected error (you know what you typed, you can research it and fix it and move on).

What I didn't like:

• Compiling a kernel on day one. No big deal for me, but it did take three kernel compiles to get it right (unfamiliar hardware plus the default 2.6 config disabled UDEV, then complained on first boot that I needed the obsolete DEVFS). It would be very easy to mess up a config and get a non-booting system. The Handbook doesn't tell a newbie how to recover from that. Having a bloated, precompiled kernel to copy off CD wouldn't be so bad.
• Documentation of ports is horrible -- one line descriptions? Come on! And I still have to figure out how to tell which USE flags affect a port before I compile it.
• Config file wrapper commands -- hasn't bitten me yet, but editing a well-commented config file should be encouraged. No rc-update please! (old Slackware user talking here...)

All in all, portage makes it worth using and I will install it on real hardware someday.